NHL Draft Lottery Odds Revealed

The NHL Draft Lottery will take place on June 2 and the Devils are in a pretty good position to move up as the odds were announced yesterday by the league.

The Devils currently stand at fourth with a 10.3-percent chance of winning the lottery. They are tied with the expansion Seattle Kraken, placed in third with the same percentage chance of winning as the Devils.

Out of the 16 teams that missed the playoffs, Buffalo is the first seed with a 16.6-percent chance of staying at number one. Anaheim is two (12.1-percent) while Seattle and the Devils occupy the three and four spots. Columbus is one behind the Devils at 8.5-percent.

They are followed by Detroit (7.6-percent), San Jose (6.7-percent), Los Angeles (5.8-percent), Vancouver (5.4-percent) and Ottawa (4.5-percent).

Arizona is next with a 3.1-percent chance. The NHL announced that the Coyotes have forfeited their first-round pick in 2021 due to sanctions related to violations of the NHL Combine Testing Policy in 2019-20. This means that should the Coyotes win, there will be a re-draw.

The Coyotes are followed by Chicago (2,7-percent), Calgary (2.2-percent), Philadelphia (1.8-percent), Dallas (1.4-percent) and the Rangers (1.0-percent).

The Lottery will take place on June 2 while the 2021 NHL Draft will be held July 23-24.

As Amanda Stein mentioned on the “Inside the Devils Blog,” the Devils have won the lottery twice in the team’s history in New Jersey. They won in 2017 (the pick that ended up being Nico HIschier) and in 2019 (that picked ended up as Jack Hughes).

They have had three first overall picks in franchise history including in 1979 when the then-Colorado Rockies chose Rob Ramage first. That was pre-Lottery, however.

In other news, stay tuned here as the IIHF World Championship gets underway tomorrow. The lone game tomorrow involving Devils is Belarus (Yegor Sharangovich) versus Slovakia (Marian Studenic).